Call for help: Contact TI to change their firmware licensing for wireless drivers

sounds like a very good idea to try to get TI to license their binary firmware files for free distribution or distribution in specific useful ways.

However, the current attempt seems a bit "rough", if you know what I mean ;-)
OTOH, TI has been playing that "let's pretend you don't exist" game (very popular with way too many hardware manufacturers, it seems) for far too long, despite numerous attempts of acx1xx users to contact them (I haven't even attempted to contact them myself, since I knew that so many people were unsuccessful), so it could be quite justified after all.

My driver chose to go the alternative download route at first, since it's not too much of a hassle to download files from some other site (this could be seen in a different light since the wireless connection at that moment doesn't work yet for rather obvious reasons, but OTOH you'd have to get the wireless driver by other means, too).

Note that Tim Riker is Linux guy #1 at TI, according to his own homepage, so it might be worth contacting him first.

Let's hope that this finally manages to improve some parts of the current extraordinarily messy TI hardware support situation. Nobody wants to force people to open up their specifications completely if they don't deem it useful, but that's certainly no excuse for throwing millions of el-cheapo cards into the market and then not cooperating in *ANY* way (minus the initial leaked random Linux binary versions, which helped a bit...).
After this experience of TI "quality", I will think rather hard about using TI components in my current and future embedded systems related career.

P.S.: in case you didn't know yet, I'm the main author of the ACX100 Linux driver... (if you need more info about getting some BSD driver finished for acx1xx, then please contact me, I'll try to help as far as I can)

NetBSD has some nice resources on kernel programming. I found a guide to writing device drivers a few days ago which looks promising.

The firmware is not needed to write a driver per se, but if you want the driver to do anything useful, you need to have the firmware loaded onto the NIC, otherwise it cannot do anything apart from adding to your electricity bill. The firmware is a piece of code which is executed on the NIC, not in the kernel, and this is why it doesn't matter a great deal if it's binary or not.

Of course, it's possible to write our own firmware by disassembling the official firmware, but it's far from an easy task, and it's very likely to be extremely time consuming and just as error prone.

However, this shouldn't be necessary at all. Call TI today, because noone else will.

The firmware binary needs to be loaded onto the card to make the card work (actually, there's a firmware for the ACX100 chip and a separate firmware for whatever radio the card uses, the ACX100 supports different types of radio). The card internals are basically totally unknown, the firmware provides the interface for the operating system's driver.

Also, in this case there is actually no documentation of the interface to this chip; we're working on porting a FreeBSD driver, which is based on a linux driver developed by reverse engineering a closed driver. Yes, this sucks. Of course we would like to get documentation. But what we are asking for now is much, much less than that:

All we want is right to distribute the binary firmware (which comes on the CD with the card), so that the driver can be included in GENERIC. Whatever license the firmware is available under, it's not acceptable for OpenBSD to become less free if we include it. That criteria is not currently met.